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Aleksandar Hemon's new novel, his first since The Lazarus Project in 2008, is a mixture of a philosophy lesson and a farce, comparable with Joshua Ferris's To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void, but lacking the panache of those uneven books.

The Making of Zombie Wars wants to execute an even more extreme act of juxtaposition - escapist fantasy versus existential crisis, zombies versus metaphysics, shaggy dog versus the meaning of life - as captured by the line: "If there is no God, who made the first rhubarb pie?" But the moment of synthesis never comes and, instead, the reader is asked to shuttle between two modes.

The hero, Joshua Levin, is an aspiring screenwriter in Chicago. His deficient ideas are given in precis, with punning titles (Singin' in the Brain). But Joshua is also a fan of Spinoza ("da man, the first secular Jew in history"), whose philosophy is peppered across the book, and therefore able to view his own stasis from a great height, with a theoretical wisdom that never affects his conduct.

Joshua sits in the Coffee Shoppe, ostensibly to write, though most of the time caught in "the worldwide web of temptation". He attends a writing workshop ("workshop(pe)?" he wonders) where his work-inprogress, Zombie Wars ("About zombies. And wars"), receives varying lengths of shrift from a room of rivals.

Then, in a bid to escape this early-thirty-something rut, Joshua embarks on an affair with Ana, a Bosnian immigrant married with a daughter, at which point he finds himself in a plot as deranged as that of his script, but his soldiers are replaced by unhinged vets and (in the novel's central claim to sincerity) his zombies are replaced by immigrants.

In the background, George Bush is sending the United States to war in the Middle East, an event that intrudes via television footage and the occasional allusive one-liner: "Revenge is a dish best served with carpet bombing."

In his descriptions, Hemon, who learnt most of his English as an immigrant, achieves the vividness he is aiming for: a bald crown reddens "patchily like a lava lamp"; clouds are seen floating "like meringue zeppelins". But his giddy way with image and metaphor is too often a slave to the novel's comic needs. The results can be strained: Joshua's dreams "did not so much end abruptly as they whimpered their lame way into his wakeful state".

As in most comic novels, there seems to be no such thing as a target too near or large or obvious. So we get complaints about brunch ("an abominably monstrous compound noun") and the "ever-growing army of people who laugh at their own jokes". As if the stakes didn't feel low enough, Hemon also makes persistent efforts to lower the tone - and to alert us to this lowering.

A famous quotation is reworked to flag up the frivolity of a situation: "History: the first time a joke, the second a badly translated joke." At one point, a character's eyes are described as "dark and - as they'd say in a novel - foreboding".

The lesson is clear: in the squalid 21st century, we are no longer worthy of Marx's grandeur, or even fiction's adjectives. But this disillusionment never grows into a worldview, any more than all the knowingness qualifies as humour.